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Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Thesis advisor: Richard Kearney / This dissertation asks what it means to be faithful to the friend. From Aristotle onward friendship has often been taken as the foundation of political life, but as it is a private relation that excludes many fellow citizens, fidelity to the friend may conflict with the duties of citizenship and endanger the political realm. What is more, one can never be perfectly faithful to one’s friend, so is true friendship impossible? I argue that friendship, though always a risk, directs us toward a justice that is higher than the political. Moreover, friendship is a great good that is suited to our finitude. While our finitude renders perfect fidelity impossible, it is also the horizon within which alone friendship can take place. Friendship is possible for those who admit its impossibility, who love precisely that the other – whether the other person or a language – escapes them.Chapter 1 considers selected ancient and medieval examinations of friendship in order to clarify friendship’s unstable place in the borderlands of hostility and hospitality. Only the dispossession of the self opens it to alterity. Thus if friendship is possible, it is possible only between strangers, not citizens secure in their ipseity. To bind people into a community, it must also shatter open any community in which they believe themselves to be comfortably at home. Chapter 2 further explores, in light of Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics, the conflict between friendship and one’s obligation to others. Levinas posits a self who is absolutely responsible for every other according to an asymmetrical ethical relation; how then can one prefer the friend to others? I reply that friendship serves as a forceful reminder of the singularity of the other and of the inadequacy of the comparisons among people that politics must employ to determine whose interests will win out. Friendship is not, however, only a signpost that points to ethics: it is a good that needs no justification to be worthwhile. Chapter 3 proposes that friendship arises from our finitude. Drawing on Emmanuel Falque’s work, I maintain that finitude is a positive good that is suited to humans. Friends translate the world for each other – but what of the fact that translation is always unfaithful? It is impossible, as Jacques Derrida has emphasized, to maintain infinite fidelity to the friend, but this impossibility is constitutive of friendship. Stepping beyond this horizon would not lead to better friendships but would destroy the possibility of friendship by taking us outside the limits that constitute humanity, when it is as humans that we love each other in friendship. Chapter 4 further investigates the possibility of friendship by taking up the suggestion, raised in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, that friendship is an illusion because it pretends to offer knowledge of another even though such knowledge is impossible. I argue that a careful reading of the Search reveals that writing itself functions as an act of friendship: the narrator discovers that through writing his world can encounter the worlds of others. True friendship is a relation across absence. Finally, chapter 5 shows how the promise of fidelity to the friend constitutes the self: the promise creates the very world that the self is called to translate for the friend. I conclude that although one can never achieve perfect fidelity to the friend, this is no reason to despair of fidelity: the very infidelity of the self’s witness to the friend may still bear witness to the friend’s irreplaceability. Bearing witness to the friend is a task to be undertaken in fear and trembling but also in gratitude and joy, for friendship is a great good of our existence within finitude. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

The dissertation considers the influence of Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger, and Simone Weil on Grant's understanding of technology. Chapters One and Two analyze Ellul's influence on Grant, while Chapter Three examines Heidegger's influence on Grant's understanding of technology. Chapter Four examines the consequences of Grant's ambiguous evaluation of Ellul and Heidegger. Grant's unwillingness to entirely accept either account of technology leads to a tension in which aspects of Ellul 's account of technology are held simultaneously with elements of Heidegger's account. As a way to overcome the tension between these explanations, Grant becomes open to gnostic elements in Weil's theology, which manifest themselves in radical dualism and esoteric wisdom. The purpose of the dissertation is to clarify the significance of Ellul for Grant's thought. Scholars often overlook the extent of Ellul's contribution for Grant's account of technology, particularly in Grant's refinement of concepts such as technological necessity and his critique of liberal ideology. Furthermore, the dissertation seeks to reveal the pliability of Grant's account of technology, which is closely linked to Grant's theological, philosophical, and political judgments. The dissertation suggests that Grant's understanding of technology leads Grant to espouse gnostic elements from Weil's theology (such as radical dualism and esoteric wisdom) as a palliative to the arid technological necessity and moral inarticulacy of technological civilization. The dissertation challenges the scholarly orthodoxy that exists in the interpretation of Grant's work. Through a fresh reading of primary and secondary sources, the dissertation advocates an alternative approach to understanding Grant's thought. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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<p>This dissertation interrogates the ways in which the ethical rhetoric following September 11th, 2001 (particularly that of the administration of U.S. President George Bush) and contemporary globalization (which Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have called "Empire") implicate one other, as well as the ways in which these interlinked discourses are currently shaping the post-9/11 global "ethical climate" and its universalized human subject. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida's concept of "hauntology" which he introduces in Specters of Marx (1994), the main argument of the thesis is that the dominant post-9/11 ethical rhetoric is a specter of Empire, such that it is both a symptom of and a particularly influential force-of-law shaping the "Spirit" of contemporary globalization/Empire. The thesis claims that in their shared universalism, neo-Hegelian remainders of idealism, and theocratic impulses to contain and ethicopolitically manage the entire world, globalization/Empire and its most serious recent symptoms-Bush's post-9/11 ethical rhetoric and the global war on terror--contain suicidal auto-deconstructive tendencies that threaten to destroy themselves from within in spite of their utopic visions of themselves. Finally, the dissertation investigates some of the key spectral remainders of "9/11" and contemporary ethical thought which contradict and/or corroborate the dominant post-9/11 discourse of Empire and its universalized ethico-political human subject.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation answers three questions relating to Jacques Derrida’s writings: why is Derrida concerned with human/animal difference? How should his deconstruction of this distinction be understood in the context of his broader philosophical project? Finally, do the answers to these questions complicate the belief that Derrida’s thought promotes a post-human ethics? Whereas Derrida’s sensitivity to the suffering of non-human creatures partially explains his interest in “the animal,” there are complex reasons for why he frequently returns to interrogate this theme–reasons that can only be understood by first clarifying core features of his philosophy. I maintain that what obsesses Derrida in virtually all of his writings is how a longstanding, “metaphysical” view of human consciousness proves deconstructable. Following Derrida, I term this view “living presence”–the belief that experience happens presently to beings who are present to themselves. In undermining this view, Derrida reimagines experience as what I term “survival,” where the very things traditionally thought to be foreign to human subjective life are required for experience to carry on happening. Importantly, the fact that philosophers repeatedly describe human consciousness in terms of presence is not simply an error. It is rather an effort to preserve the living present against the threat that everything opposed to presence plays in its very possibility. This explains why human/animal difference is so strenuously affirmed throughout the history of Western thought on Derrida’s view. Animals are not simply inferior kinds of beings compared to humans; there is rather thought to be an essential difference between the two. Whereas humans encounter themselves and their world presently, animal are utterly instinctual, reactional, and non-present to themselves. However, by deconstructing the human/animal distinction, Derrida reveals that those features traditionally associated with animals are necessary for any life, human or otherwise, to exist. For this reason, “the animal” is a “pharmakon”: it both sustains and upsets a long-held understanding of what we uniquely are. In my final analysis, I examine whether my reading of Derrida’s thought is compatible with a non-human ethics. I do so in two steps: first, I examine a prominent reading of Derrida’s thought that contends that it is. For a large number of thinkers in “animal studies,” Derrida’s thought is aligned with the philosophy Emmanuel Levinas in important respects: whereas Derrida rejects Levinas’ anthropocentrism, he retains the core of Levinas’ ethics. However, I argue that the conditions that Derrida believes make life possible undermine this reading of his work. In the end, I argue that if deconstruction is an ethics, it is so only because it promotes “life” understood in the sense developed in this dissertation. Yet we must be mindful of what deconstruction does not provide in the way of an ethics: on the one hand, any standard of ethical belief is deconstructible. On the other hand, deconstruction does not necessarily promote a more inclusive and compassionate future. Whereas it can do so, it might also inaugurate a future that is less inclusive and more savage. This is, I argue, precisely what cannot be known. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)